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Counterfeiters, The
Sony Pictures Classics


8.1

based on 23 reviews
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based on 7 votes
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FILM:

MPAA RATING: R for some strong violence, brief sexuality/nudity and language

Starring Karl Markovics, August Diehl, and Devid Striesow

The true story of Salomon Sorowitsch, counterfeiter extraordinaire and bohemian who was in captured by the Nazis in 1944. He agrees to help the Nazis in an organized counterfeiting operation set up to finance the war effort. It was the biggest counterfeit-money scam of all time. Over 130 million pounds sterling were printed under conditions that couldn't have been more tragic or spectacular. During the last years of the war, as the German Reich saw that the end was near, the authorities decided to produce their own banknotes in the currencies of their major war enemies. They hoped to use the duds to flood the enemy economy and fill the empty war coffers. At the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, two barracks were separated from the rest of the camp and the outside world, and transformed into a fully equipped counterfeiters workshop. "Operation Bernhard" was born. Prisoners were brought to Sachsenhausen from other camps to implement the plan, and professional printers, fastidious bank officials, and simple craftsmen all became members of the top-secret counterfeiter crew. They had a choice: If they cooperated with the enemy, they had a chance to survive as first-class prisoners in a "golden cage" with enough to eat and a bed to sleep in. If they sabotaged the operation, a sure death awaited them. For the counterfeiters, it was not only a question of saving their own lives, but also about saving their conscience as well... (Sony Classics)

GENRE(S):	Crime \| Drama \| War
WRITTEN BY:	Stefan Ruzowitzky Adolf Burger
DIRECTED BY:	Stefan Ruzowitzky
RELEASE DATE:	Theatrical: February 22, 2008
RUNNING TIME:	98 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	German
LANGUAGE(S):	Austria / Germany

Alternative Titles: Die Fälscher

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

The Counterfeiters is in its own smart, trim fashion "The Bridge on the River Kwai" of concentration-camp sagas. Also based (like Kwai) on a real-life story, this movie starts small but becomes a miniature epic of overreach and moral drift.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Without doing anything so divisive as taking sides, The Counterfeiters pays sympathetic attention to those who play their cards to win even when the rules are terrible, not least because the remarkable Markovics, an Austrian TV actor with a pugnacious anvil of a head, is so riveting as an unsaintly survivor.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

This poses some tricky moral questions, and its troubling ambiguities rank a cut above the dubious uplift of "Schindler's List."

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

The Counterfeiters differs from most Holocaust movies in that the emphasis is on the personal moral choices that are made rather than the overall horror and despair.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Swift and compelling, winner of this year’s Oscar for best foreign-language picture, The Counterfeiters may not be destined for the large international audience that embraced last year’s winner, “The Lives of Others.” But it’s the better, tougher film, with a more provocative moral dilemma at its center.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Some movies rest on an actor's face, and The Counterfeiters has a great one.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Quiet, watchful, out for himself, Sorowitsch is a complicated figure - neither hero nor villain, and certainly no fool. The Austrian actor Markovics is riveting in the role; he is wiry, anticipatory, his eyes darting with intelligence and worry.

The New Yorker David Denby

The Counterfeiters is a testament to guile. Ruzowitzky scored the picture with tangos, and the tangos are meant to be Sally’s music--seductive, insolent, triumphant.

Portland Oregonian Stan Hall

While terrific entertainment, The Counterfeiters fails to stir the soul.

Miami Herald Connie Ogle

It is always intriguing as it follows the arrest and captivity of Salomon Sorowitsch (the terrific Karl Markovics), one of Germany's leading counterfeiters.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

A conventional mixture of thriller and moral drama, the film is unsettling in both intentional and unintentional ways.

San Francisco Chronicle David Wiegand

Well made, provocative and compelling.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

A gripping, unusual and suitably harrowing -- if, in the final analysis, not particularly satisfying -- concentration camp drama.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

From an historical perspective, the story is interesting because it shows a different side of the war than what we're used to observing in motion pictures.

New York Post Kyle Smith

Based on the true story of the world's largest counterfeiting operation, The Counterfeiters is full of the weird details that, though unsurprising on one level, are so jarringly wrong that they seem fresh: As a reward for producing 134 million pounds sterling, the prisoners get a pingpong table.

TV Guide Ken Fox

Though extensively fictionalized -- Sorowitch is loosely based on the notorious, larger-than-life forger Salomon Smolianoff; Herzog on SS officer Bernhard Krueger, after whom the operation was named.

Variety Eddie Cockrell

The moral quandary of Nazi complicity is revisited in taut drama The Counterfeiters, which tells the true story of a disparate group of imprisoned artists, financiers and swindlers secretly assembled in a concentration camp to forge millions of pound and dollar notes to support the German war effort.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

The Counterfeiters demonstrates that no matter how many Holocaust stories the movies tell, there are always new and unexpected ones waiting to be revealed.

Village Voice Ella Taylor

At its best--and queasiest--The Counterfeiters asks disturbing questions more commonly found in the survivor literature of Primo Levi or Bruno Bettelheim than at the movies.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

The Counterfeiters is inevitably serious, even austere, and full of chilling, ironic details.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

The Counterfeiters is a swift and suspenseful thriller, and perhaps a little too entertaining for its own good.

Washington Post Adam Bernstein

Though swiftly paced, The Counterfeiters convincingly examines the complex nature of humanity under inhuman conditions

The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson

Markovics largely rescues the film with his mesmerizingly layered, steady performance as a man who solves the problem of compromise by refusing to admit that he's compromising.

The average user rating for this movie is 8.1 (out of 10) based on 7 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Chad S. gave it an8:
A "mercy f***"; it's the first bit of English that an Auschwitz survivor named Meyer Maslow learned when he first immigrated to the states, in novelist Francine Prose's "A Changed Man". Maslow, the leader of an Amnesty International-type organization, used the holocaust for sex with college coeds when he taught at an American university. Concentration camps and post-war sex collude in "Die Falscher"(American title: "The Counterfeiters"), too, as a hooker waives her services rendered charge after she sees the identifying markings on Salomon Sorowitsch's arms that denote the Russian's first-hand experience with crematoriums and other Nazi iconography. Maslow, for all we know(Prose keeps her novel in the present), could've been a Nazi collaborator like Sorowitsch(Karl Markovics), who insists that the prostitute take the money, because the counterfeiter knows he doesn't deserve a mercy f***. Like "Schindler's List", a war profiteer(August Diehl as Adolf Burger) incidentally saves the lives of a few Jews by putting them to work, but unlike the Steven Spielberg film, there are no clear-cut heroes to put a face on Operation Bernhard. Salomon is like the marathon runner who walks throughout the race, but scores the free t-shirt, nevertheless. Salomon was "there", without really being there, which makes "Die Falscher" unique from other movies about the forced labor camps. This time around, the morally compromised only goes through the motions of expelling his bumpy past. Listen closely to what Salomon tells the whore after his self-abnegating exorcism.

Fantasy gave it a10:
Excellent! Most worthy of the praise and honors it ireceived.

Dennis B. gave it an8:
Well-written, with realistic, nuanced performances helped by a story whose shadings of right and wrong hold your interest from beginning to end. Not as emotionally powerful as Schindler's List, but worth seeing just the same. Makes you wonder how you would have behaved in the same situation.

Jay W. gave it a10:
A work of art with a superb ensemble cast, economically possible only in foreign cinema.

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Counterfeiters, The Sony Pictures Classics

Counterfeiters, The
Sony Pictures Classics